redcairo

Well if cordial communications don't improve in those, the day-after will look like The Day After.

RC

My meditations are not 'empty mind' and tend to be filled with other-identities. The 'me' seems to be composed of twelve other identities, plus my chakras function with identities, and a whole variety of what some call guides. It's like a huge family in my interworlds life! I suppose all that would be distracting if one was working to keep an empty mind though. :-)

RC

The only religious opinion I feel sure of is this: self-awareness is not just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

The first principle of freedom is the right to go to hell in your own handbasket.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-- All by Robert Heinlein

Ooh, that has a good dose of 'as above, so below' built right into it!

This picture is actually created from a new technology. It was part of mapping one of dozens of shipwrecks recently found deep under the black sea, unusually preserved due to the nature of that water. Ottoman-era!

I will have to rely on memory and willpower. Oy. :-)

For some reason I'm reminded of -- maybe Mark Twain, can't recall -- saying that one of the most difficult things is to be suffering from the same ailment someone is describing and not mention it. I practice that from time to time as a test. :-)  When the threads are about politics, it is nearly the same thing.

RC

I stopped reading, watching, or hearing the news many, many years ago.

But I see it 'by proxy' on various forums or lists I read. I try to choose only a few bloodlettings at a time. ;-)

I got rid of my TV in 1993.

But now I sometimes watch shows on my computer so I suppose I circumvented that.

I gave up every social media, but visit Facebook about once every 2-3 months just to get stuff a tiny few close people have sent me within that context. That nearly killed my attitude before I pulled myself out. Made a big sucking noise... felt like that moment in The Matrix when all the tubes are pulled out of him and from down his throat and then he's flushed, LOL. It was all for the best...

RC

In a couple of threads fairly recently, I decided to cease participating. It's sometimes difficult to resist the temptation to look at them -- which I don't want to since I worry it'll drag me back into it. :-)  It occurs to me that eventually I may forget that somewhere in a thread I decided to officially depart it. I was wondering how I could mark such for myself and it got me wondering if there is a way to ignore a thread the same way you ignore a user, where the system hides it from you. Possible?

RC

Thanks for sharing your life Dave.

RC

This is an HDR image (hence the texture). The photographer said the orange round thing was actually the sun seeming to be burning through a layer of clouds. The sun's rays above, and the shadows, and the way the cloudbank just happened to echo the general shape/place of the main building, makes this pretty cool I think.

One Night in Bangkok from Flickr

This is an old thread, but it made me cry. Can you tell us the eventual outcome with your uncle?

Boy you went through a helluva time during that era. I hope your life events are a bit smoother now.

RC

Beautiful flower!

This is underwhelming as a pic but a cool thing:

Thank you for the conversation, everyone. I am sure this thread will continue on happily without me. :-)

I wish the election would just be over already... gods.

RC

Thank you Ralis, and everyone else, for the conversation. I have nothing useful to add further I feel to this thread, so I will bow out gracefully and wish you well with it.

Best regards,

RC

What does her being a woman have to do with it, though?

Are people not allowed to have the same response to her 'as a candidate' as people do about any other candidate?

RC

 

BTW, I don't care what his emoticon denotes and his comments are not humorous whatsoever. My partner just read it and she found no humor whatsoever.

Well I thought it was kinda funny.  Sorry.  I'd have thought it was just as funny if someone said it about Trump!

 

Hillary is taking far too much abuse from the patriarchal authoritarians. Trump was stalking her on stage during the debate

Have you ever been present in controversial meetings in business? Board of Directors furious debate about stock splits and takeovers? I have. Trump behaved pretty much in keeping with the professional deformation his working role has provided. He didn't behave like an aggressive bonehead because she was a woman... he behaved that way because he is an aggressive bonehead, who has had a long history of jobs that tend to be (sadly) dominated by aggressive boneheads, and he is running for a CEO job in which he believes (wrongly or rightly) that an aggressive bonehead personality will actually be a good thing for the job. Apparently some people agree with him.

Hillary basically said a woman should be president solely because of being a woman, and then said outright that women simply better understood issues about families and jobs. To me, that's completely sexist. Had a man said the opposite about a woman, he'd have been crucified.

So when people react to her, considering them "patriarchal authoritarians" does not seem fair to me -- she is in a position of authority and she herself openly says she wants to literally invalidate two of the most primary freedoms that define the nature of our country and our culture, she insults men, she insults everybody not on her wagon actually and not just a little but with all kinds of globally demeaning epithets, but if someone insults her, it is because they are behaving injustly?

They may be, but I don't think you have to be a patriarchal authoritarian to find her comments and her behavior problematic.

Or to find DT's problematic, frankly, I don't like either of them.

RC

Well there is nothing to question unless we are the investigators and until after the trial. In the case of the FBI making public press releases, that's a little different situation.

I actually have an interest in this 'social' topic -- of men accused of rape publicly, without trial, and its repercussions, and the becoming far too common policy of "arranging" for any man someone at high level wants to harm to be promptly accused of such, with such ridiculous timing and repeat on multiple people it becomes unbelievable eventually.

I will not support the destruction of US Citizens without due process solely because they are men. I believe all men, and women, should defend this as an egregious injustice -- not to mention a terrifying precedent for social and political manipulation. It would be easier to have this debate were the person in question not a loudmouthed cretin to be honest, but the underlying point is still valid IMO. This is a serious problem in our culture. To me, allowing and encouraging this is basically just supporting the third-wave feminist vision of all men being assumed rapists.

RC

I quoted what I wrote and what he wrote, to give context.

I thought what he said, how he said it, and his emoticon, implied a "spikey humor insult."

Not "hate speech."

Clearly you care deeply for HIllary and/or are extremely sensitive to people not being positive in their conversation and/or perhaps just "here." I apologize for apparently making it worse.

RC

Investigation is not an indictment nor has she been tried in a court of law. Only in the court of public opinion.

I agree. Yet you used in your own earlier post a claim against DT that is just one civilian not even in trial -- and this at least has the actual FBI officially involved. If your point is only conviction matters, then your own examples probably need to change, right.

I apologize if I sounded lecturing previously -- it is so difficult to write on a forum since all 'essay' sounds like a sermon or a rant sometimes. I only was reacting to a little emotion on my part, that was sad you were clearly so upset about it, as I have seen other posts by you and I liked you very much.

RC

If it is out of bounds because thedaobums is a "kinder, gentler" sort of forum, and this is disturbing the vibrations of the kumbaya chorus, then I agree.

If it is out of bounds because this (quoting specifics) is considered hateful and unallowed even as a flippancy:

 

> Seriously. Nearly everybody I know wants HC in the chair...
>> oh, I want her in the chair...   preferably one connected to 440V

Is it kind? No. But it makes me thinks of lots of conversations I've seen where for example, some highly controversial person is said to be "right on the edge of the cliff of insanity" and someone else jokes, "Nudge him off!"

I just don't see it as horrible and hateful. If we were standing in sunday school it would be. On the internet -- even in a "thoughtful, philosophical, though often too-spirited and spikey in debate" forum -- it just seems like people making a snarky comment.

Maybe my skin is too thick. But I still do not think "anything that qualifies as 'dislike' is hate speech." I think it is very specific to hating because someone is part of a certain group.

RC

Do you suppose the energy of the election is actually sort of permeating everything, and things will mellow everwhere when it's over and we are back to the same-ol?

RC

It was a tongue in cheek insult as I recall. He wasn't inciting people to kidnap her and put her in an electric chair. And he wasn't making the insult "because she was a woman."

Disliking someone and happily considering their potential manners of doom is not actually hate speech in my book -- unless your reason, and your words when you say it or joke it, are because they are part of some specific group/class of people.

As opposed to just the group/class of people who are such boneheads they're easy to wish doom upon. Those come in all colors, genders and politic!

RC

You deny the hate speech that is piled on here which is directed towards her.

Please, please, reconsider your definitions, since you are in a communal conversation area.

"Hate speech" is talk which is malevolent and incitive toward a given individual or group solely based on that individual or group being part of a defined class against which one is biased.

For example, insulting someone solely because they are striped or triangle. Pointing out they are so, or pointing out their politics or behavior suck, neither of those would be hate speech -- but insults specific to, or couched in language specific to, their striped or triangle nature, THAT would be hate speech.

Saying someone has behaved criminally when legal authorities are publicly announcing they suspect someone has behaved criminally, is not hate speech.

I'm sure there are some personal insults in the thread -- the threads I see around the web on DT surely win for the most egregious insult if it's a contest though, and it would be just as easy to claim that people only hate him because he is "a rich white man." 

(Not that both candidates don't have SO many good reasons to dislike them to choose from.)

I hope you are not implying that because people don't like a presidential candidate, they just hate 'em cause they're (black, female, whatever). That argument was insulting enough when Obama was running. It'd be just as bad but even worse, just for its getting so old now status, if it's being used for Hillary being a woman.

The same people who most despise HC would probably vote Anne Coulter president if she ran LOL.

RC

Further, you are part of the gang here that piles on a female candidate every chance you have.

Although I have been around about a year now, I don't always read political threads so I apologize if I lack context.

But: what other female candidates have "the gang here" piled on?

I only ask because it seems like there aren't that many of them at the national level to pile on.

And given this one is so extreme (I mean she has, with pride and no secret, basically promised to change fundamentally the first and second amendment) it's kind of easy to see why she'd have some detractors, not even counting the current stuff.

As for DT's issues -- yeah, he's got serious issues too, I agree -- it seems to me the issue is not so much everyone is defending him (if anybody did, I did only by suggesting such behavior was typical at that level) as it is people focusing on what they find a lot more important, and those things seem like trivia comparatively. I'm not sure that's the same as just saying they aren't real or are ok.

RC

PS hadn't heard about the lawsuit you mention, however, I believe very much in innocent until proven guilty, and have seen far too much abuse of the legal system for reputational defamation, so I don't think it's appropriate to bring such things up. I would defend even HC, whom I despise, from things pressed by non-legal entities (e.g. not the FBI) that had not yet gone through trial.

Wow.

"...admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s – it emerged at the weekend."

Probably putting myself up as a punching bag, here, but:

So? They were already dead. They ain't gettin' any deader. They aren't using those organs now. They don't care. 

People support recycling and composting, and using every part of the animal. But there is some requirement human body parts should be wasted, when they can save other human lives, as organs or as tissue?

The only reason I can see for this being a serious issue is because, of course, it could definitely lead to killing people solely for their body parts (like that book COMA). As if we lack enough reasons to kill people already, especially in the middle east.

But aside from that element, I fail to see what the problem is. I mean, in combat, people can be tortured and raped and eviscerated and hey, that's war, but if they die and then a medic uses their liver to save someone else's life, it's a war crime??

RC

 

How do you feel about people like the Dalai Lama being pressured by LGBT activists to get his religion to change.  Is that right?

Is it right at all for humans to behave that way?

Er, no, though that kind of supports my point that the problem isn't religion it's people. (When it's religion, it's because of people making stupid things in it or using it badly.)

He knows better than anyone, that he cannot simply mandate a change in a religious tradition that is very, very old. The only thing he could do is have a personal opinion openly -- but it's his personal opinion -- which it wouldn't be if he were bowing to someone else's opinion.

The Dalai Llama has stood up to the entire Chinese empire -- I think he can resist social activists. :-)

But, some geniuses have issues being emotionally available.  So, changing society is not a way for these to be accepted.

I apologize that I think I missed the post that would put the above lines in context. I'm not sure how they relate to each other right now. When you think about it though, if an individual cannot relate to society, it seems a bit injust to expect society to relate to that person. Maybe in a larger sense, those two things are not unrelated at all.

It is a flaw in human thinking when we try to force others to change for our benefit.

Sure. Well, on the surface I agree with that statement.

But I will mention that we do live in a communal world, and if others are behaving antisocially by which I mean harmfully to others; or if we are "responsible for feeding and protecting" person-X but person X will neither leave (so he's not our problem anymore) nor allow us to feed and protect him (which his presence requires, since starving or shooting him would also be injust), then trying to mitigate the situation so that he changed somewhat -- enough to make the larger situation tenable all around -- would make sense to me.

I do think I may have missed some previous context in my skim of the thread though so if I'm kind of off on Mars here I apologize. Are we only talking about LGBT-etc.?

As for religion not existing, then Daoism does not exist.  Then what would be the purpose?

I was under the impression that Daoism was a term that sort of described one's intuitive, innate desire and effort to live within a sense of balance with What IS (the IS-ness of Truth about which not much can really be said). What IS, is not the Tao?

I guess I didn't realize it was a religion-with-a-tax-bracket formally? Sorry I am a bit new to the topic.

This is a part of the eventual acceptance of a Globalist type society.  It is inevitable.  But, I think you will find this prophesy timely as it is part of the events leading up to the final war.

I think some of the elements in humans that cause them to 'bond' to one another in positive ways, also cause that same bonding to create a division -- what is in the group, what is ok, defines by its existence what is not in the group, and not ok. I think until human beings fundamentally change (perhaps the fourth density, as some call it) this probably won't improve.

RC